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Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline.
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Christopher Hitchens (The Enemy)
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Ayub’s pro- Western outlook, moderate views, and fair complexion, which made him look more British than the British, confirmed his selection as commander- in- chief in January 1951.
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Ayesha Jalal (The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics)
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It is as if a woman has a right to vote, but the polling place is across the state and casting a ballot costs two weeks’ pay, and as if she has a right to be a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist, but her place of worship is a four-hour bus ride away, and before she can go to services she has to listen to a fundamentalist Christian sermon warning her that if she doesn’t accept Jesus as her personal savior she’s going straight to hell. We would never accept the kinds of restrictions on our other constitutional rights that we have allowed to hamper the right to end a pregnancy.
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Katha Pollitt (Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights)
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But somebody sure as hell’s trying to start a war in this country. Liberal against conservative, city against country, pro-gun against gun control, pro-government against pro-freedom, black against white against brown, Christian against Muslim… There’s no other explanation that makes sense.
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Matthew Bracken (Enemies Foreign And Domestic (The Enemies Trilogy, #1))
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The assumption on the part of most Indian political parties that overt friendship with Israel would cost its advocates dearly at the Indian ballot box remains a strong factor, especially when elections loom in states with a significant number of Muslim voters. It did not help that pro-Israeli stances were, in the early years, advocated only by the communally minded Hindu chauvinist party the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which used support for Israel mainly as an additional stick to beat the Muslims with.
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Shashi Tharoor (Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century)
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I believe every single man, woman, and child—including the pre-born—is created in the image of God. I believe in the sanctity and dignity of life from womb to tomb. Not only babies’ lives, but also the lives of their mothers. Not just our lives, but their lives. Not just American lives, but Syrian lives. Not just Christian lives, but Muslim lives. To be pro-all-life is to acknowledge the systemic injustice that operates against indigenous and black and brown people in our culture. To be pro-all-life is to be broken by the fact that LGBTQ youth are three to six times more likely to attempt suicide. 16 And the list goes on …
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Eugene Cho (Thou Shalt Not Be a Jerk: A Christian's Guide to Engaging Politics)
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The BDS on campus operation is organized by, among others, a group in Chicago, Illinois, called American Muslims for Palestine, or AMP. For years, AMP, through its sponsorship of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), has been sending strategists, digital and communications experts, graphic designers, video editors, and legal advisors to colleges all over America and running flashy events in expensive hotels for the purpose of delegitimizing Israel, minimizing pro-Israel voices on campus, and harassing Jewish and pro-Israel students in order to deter them from supporting Israel. The embodiment of Cancel Culture. Managing such a sophisticated network of political operatives, extensive marketing, and (pre-COVID) ritzy gatherings at nice hotels is extremely expensive.11 So where is the money coming from? I
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Noa Tishby (Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth)
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As political tensions rose the sudden shift in the Chinese government’s position led to accusations of Chinese infiltrators among those early Wabaling Khaches allowed to leave for India. In India, concern centered on several pro-Chinese Wapaling Khaches who were suspiciously, some felt, included among the Barkor Khaches approved by the Chinese government’s Foreign Bureau in Lhasa to be allowed to emigrate to India.
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David G. Atwill (Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa's Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960)
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More recently that has begun to change. Long divided by borders and history, some of the intellectuals and ideologues behind these new movements have now found a set of issues they can unite around—issues that work across borders and are easy to sell online. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, both real and imagined, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative, religious worldview is another. Sometimes, opposition to the EU, or to international institutions more generally, is a third. These issues are unrelated—there is no reason why you can’t be a pro-European Catholic, as so many have been in the past—and yet those who believe in them have made common cause. Dislike of same-sex marriage, African taxi drivers, or “Eurocrats” is something that even Spaniards and Italians who disagree about their respective separatist movements can share. Avoiding history and old border disputes, they can conduct joint campaigns against the secular, ethnically mixed societies they inhabit, and at the same time appeal to the people who want the raucous debate about these things to come to a halt.
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Anne Applebaum (Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism)
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Contemptuous of all politicians, they were especially wary of a Bengali majority in any future federal constitution. If permitted to secure their rightful place in the governance of the country, Bengali politicians could join their disaffected counterparts in the non- Punjabi provinces to force a change in Pakistan’s Kashmir focused and pro- American foreign policy.
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Ayesha Jalal (The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics)
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It made strategic sense to uphold two rival forces, Sikh fundamentalism and Muslim conservatism, both pro-Empire in this period.
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Rajmohan Gandhi (Punjab)
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Ironically enough, the United States had almost nothing to do with the age-old conflict between Islam and the West. The founding of Constantinople, the birth of Islam, and the Crusades occurred centuries before North America was even colonized. The United States was only peripherally involved in creating the borders of the Middle East after World War I. This centuries-old conflict was not America’s fight, but Washington blundered into it and chose to make stabilizing the Middle East its main foreign policy objective.
After World War II, and especially during the Cold War, the United States became the guardian of Middle East stability. Islamic fundamentalists believe the United States has been policing a Middle East full of divisions that were deliberately put there to keep the region weak, keep Israel secure, and keep pro-American autocracies in place in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and, until 1979, Iran—in short, to keep Muslims locked in a nation-state system that thwarted the rightful destiny of Islam.
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Richard Engel (And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East)
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A bubble is a fragile thing, and often in the evening the professors talked worriedly about its bursting. They worried about political correctness, about their colleague on TV with a twenty-year-old female student screaming abuse into her face from a distance of three inches because of a disagreement over campus journalism, their colleague in another TV news story abused for not wanting to ban Pocahontas costumes on Halloween, their colleague forced to take at least one seminar’s sabbatical because he had not sufficiently defended a student’s “safe space” from the intrusion of ideas that student deemed too “unsafe” for her young mind to encounter, their colleague defying a student petition to remove a statue of President Jefferson from his college campus in spite of the repressible fact that Jefferson had owned slaves, their colleague excoriated by students with evangelical Christian family histories for asking them to read a graphic novel by a lesbian cartoonist, their colleague forced to cancel a production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues because by defining women as persons with vaginas it discriminated against persons identifying as female who did not possess vaginas, their colleagues resisting student efforts to “de-platform” apostate Muslims because their views were offensive to non-apostate Muslims. They worried that young people were becoming pro-censorship, pro-banning-things, pro-restrictions, how did that happen, they asked me, the narrowing of the youthful American mind, we’re beginning to fear the young. “Not you, of course, darling, who could be scared of you,” my mother reassured me, to which my father countered, “Scared for you, yes. Vith this Trotskyist beard you insist on wearing you look like an ice-pick target to me. Avoid Mexico City, especially de Coyoacán neighborhood. This iss my advice.”
In the evenings they sat in pools of yellow light, books on their laps, lost in words. They looked like figures in a Rembrandt painting, Two Philosophers Deep in Meditation, and they were more valuable than any canvas; maybe members of the last generation of their kind, and we, we who are post-, who come after, will regret we did not learn more at their feet.
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Salman Rushdie (The Golden House)
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As we got closer to the date of the speech, the lobbying grew more intense. I was asked to sit down with Lee Rosenberg, one of the leaders of AIPAC, who had been a fundraiser for Obama’s campaign. Rosy, as he was called, wanted to make sure we weren’t breaking new ground in our support for the Palestinians, or indicating that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the root of all problems in the Middle East. He then implored me to call on the Muslim world to recognize Israel “as a Jewish state.” This was a formal position that the United States had not yet taken, as it would be a signal that millions of Palestinian refugees will not have the right to return to Israel as part of a peace agreement. I sat there and took his request on board, assuring him that we were breaking no new ground in our support for the Palestinians. The Israelis were by far the stronger party in the conflict, but we were acting as if it was the reverse. One final decision was whether Obama should travel to Israel after going to Cairo. Given the concern about not wanting the speech to be seen solely through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict, we decided not to go. Ironically, we would be criticized for years by Netanyahu’s supporters for that decision, even though it was responsive to their concerns. Indeed, this established a pattern—a post facto criticism of Obama for not being sufficiently pro-Israel, which ignored the fact that he wasn’t doing anything tangible for the Palestinians and which absolved Israel’s own government for its failure to take any meaningful steps toward peace.
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Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House)
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Over the following decades, other identity markers became politicized. Religion was next. In an effort to secure the support of evangelical leaders and their increasingly mobilized flock, Republican elites staked out more and more pro-life positions. People like Jerry Falwell, Sr., the leader of the Moral Majority, a political organization associated with the Christian right, grew increasingly powerful. Democrats, seeing a chance to win over more atheists, agnostics, and culturally liberal voters, came out more and more in favor of women’s rights and access to abortion. By the early twenty-first century, if you were Christian or evangelical, you had little choice but to vote Republican. Early partisan divides on abortion were followed by increasingly polarized positions on gay rights and eventually transgender rights. Wealthy Republicans used these issues to capture the white working-class vote, and they largely succeeded, even though voting Republican was often not in workers’ economic interest. Moral imperatives and cultural identities were now, more than ever, driving voting patterns. White evangelicals now represent two-thirds of the Republican Party. By contrast, non-Christians—including agnostics, Jews, and Muslims—represent half of the Democratic Party.
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Barbara F. Walter (How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them)
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the only groups who were speaking out against HT at this stage were people like Jeremy Newmark—now of the Jewish Leadership Council—and gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. This was fantastic propaganda for HT: the opposition of pro-Israeli and pro gay rights voices only reinforced the message we were trying to get across to Muslims. “The most dangerous of the Islamic fundamentalists is Hizb al-Tahrir,” Tatchell wrote at the time. His views and warnings were ignored, and we were left laughing at people’s ignorance.
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Maajid Nawaz (Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism)
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During the twenty-one year rule of Amir Abdul Rahman (1880-1901), one of Afghanistan's more pro-British rulers, only one school was built in Kabul, and that was a madrassa. Condemned to play a passive part in an imperial Great Game, Afghanistan missed out on the indirect benefits of colonial rule, the creation of an educated class such as would supply the basic infrastructure of the postcolonial states of India, Pakistan and Egypt.
Afghanistan's resolute backwardness in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was appealing to Western romantics. Kipling, who was repelled by the educated Bengali, commended the Pashtun tribesmen- the traditional rulers of Afghanistan and also a majority among Afghans- for their courage, love of freedom, and sense of honour. These cliches about the Afghans, which would be amplified in our own time by American journalists and politicians, also had some effect on Muslims themselves.
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Pankaj Mishra (Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond)
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Several dozen Britons, most of them former British army or police officers (by mid-March 1948 some 23o British soldiers and thirty policemen had deserted),32 also served in Palestinian Arab ranks,-3-3 as did some volunteers from Yugoslavia and Germany. The Yugoslavs, possibly in their dozens, were both Christians, formerly members of pro-Axis Fascist groups, and Bosnian Muslims;-3' the handful of Germans were former Nazi intelligence, Wehrmacht, and SS officers.35
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Benny Morris (1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War)
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The President delivered major pro-Muslim world speeches in Cairo and Turkey, granted $900 million of US tax funds to Hamas, and declared that America “is not a Christian nation”. Secretary of State Clinton All of these words and actions add support to those who believe that President Obama could be the first United States President who would be willing to betray Israel, when it is attacked militarily, should that occur while he is President.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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Along with killing hundreds of pro-India Muslims ranging from political activists to suspected informers for Indian intelligence, the militants killed hundreds of Pandits on similar grounds, or without a reason.
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Basharat Peer (Curfewed Night)
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It would be bad for Lebanon and for the Middle East if the U.S. withdraws from the region. We will face a different Arab and Muslim world. It is very strange and ironic that even the pro-Iranians in Iraq are asking the Americans to stay. You could write a theater about it. Making the Americans totally withdraw from the Arab world would be a mistake, would be a disaster for the moderates in the Arab world. The radicals and the Iranians would win.
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Michael J. Totten (The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel)
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Meanwhile, Facebook censors Palestinian groups so often that they have created their own hashtag, #FBCensorsPalestine. That the groups have become prominent matters little: in 2016, Facebook blocked accounts belonging to editors at the Quds News Network and Shehab News Agency in the West Bank; it later apologized and restored the accounts.30 The following year, it did the same to the official account of Fatah, the ruling party in the West Bank.31 A year after Facebook’s relationship with the Israelis was formalized, the Guardian released a set of leaked documents exposing the ways the company’s moderation policy discriminates against Palestinians and other groups. Published in a series called “The Facebook Files,” the documents contained slides from manuals used to train content moderators. On the whole, the leaks paint a picture of a disjointed and disorganized company where the community standards are expanded piecemeal, and little attention is given to their consequences. Anna, the former Facebook operations specialist I spoke with, agrees: “There’s no ownership of processes from beginning to end.” One set of documents demonstrate with precision the imbalance on the platform between Palestinians and Israelis (and the supporters of both). In a slide deck entitled “Credible Violence: Abuse Standards,” one slide lists global and local “vulnerable” groups; alongside “foreigners” and “homeless people” is “Zionists.”32 Interestingly, while Zionists are protected as a special category, “migrants,” as ProPublica has reported, are only “quasi-protected” and “Black children” aren’t protected at all.33 In trying to understand how such a decision came about, I reached out to numerous contacts, but only one spoke about it on the record. Maria, who worked in community operations until 2017, told me that she spoke up against the categorization when it was proposed. “We’d say, ‘Being a Zionist isn’t like being a Hindu or Muslim or white or Black—it’s like being a revolutionary socialist, it’s an ideology,’” she told me. “And now, almost everything related to Palestine is getting deleted.
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Jillian York (Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism)
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A newly-released series of video documentaries — The Labour Files — based on material leaked from Britain’s Labour Party revealed how the right-wing within the party mortified the former party leader, the far-left Jeremy Corbyn, costing him his position. The documentary uncovers Israel’s role in orchestrating the departure of Corbyn who had been a vocal proponent of Palestinian rights. Evidence reveals that the Israel Lobby within the Labour Party — supported by other pro-Israel camps in Britain — campaigned against the left-wing Corbyn, accusing him of antisemitism. The right-wing party establishment manipulated these allegations to its own political advantage, which eventually led to the election of the pro-Israel Keir Starmer as party leader in 2020.
While the future course of Labour’s left wing is uncertain, one thing is for sure — Israel is an apartheid regime. The Zionist lobby has been using hybrid warfare techniques to procure worldwide legitimacy for Israel’s illegal actions in Palestine. As the Labour Files reveal, Israel has waged a war of fabricating narratives and counter-narratives. In this sort of warfare with limitless bounds, the only positive that can be drawn is that everyone is a soldier.
At a time when great powers have given in to the deceptive Israel lobby and no Muslim state is in any position to challenge Israeli advances in Palestine using conventional methods, we need to focus on building our capacity to effectively counter the Zionist narrative. With the right-wing ex-Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, set to return after elections next month, the plight of Palestinians will only exacerbate. It is high time we stopped blatantly labelling one another as ‘Yahoodi Agents’ and started educating ourselves. The least we can do for Palestinians is continue exposing the pro-Israel elements engaged in the widespread dissemination of Zionist propaganda.
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Shawez Ahmad
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he was the embodiment of political modernization (emphasizing innovation, venture capital, and a slick pro-business attitude, and so on); the new entrants into the expanding middle class saw him as the one most likely to uphold their vision of nationalism rooted in Hindu tradition; for the economically threatened upper castes, he was the rampart against the (largely imagined) growing influence of Muslims and lower castes. If members of these groups had met together and each had been asked to describe “their” Modi, their answers would probably have been largely unrecognizable to the others. But the networks in which these three groups operated were sufficiently separate that there was no need for internal consistency.
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Abhijit V. Banerjee (Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems)
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During the run-up to the 2014 election for prime minister that he won in a landslide, Narendra Modi in India managed to be at many rallies at the same time by using full-scale, three-dimensional holograms that many voters took to be real. He also managed to be at more than one place in ideological terms. To the generation of globally connected ambitious young urban Indians, he was the embodiment of political modernization (emphasizing innovation, venture capital, and a slick pro-business attitude, and so on); the new entrants into the expanding middle class saw him as the one most likely to uphold their vision of nationalism rooted in Hindu tradition; for the economically threatened upper castes, he was the rampart against the (largely imagined) growing influence of Muslims and lower castes. If members of these groups had met together and each had been asked to describe “their” Modi, their answers would probably have been largely unrecognizable to the others. But the networks in which these three groups operated were sufficiently separate that there was no need for internal consistency.
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Abhijit V. Banerjee (Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems)
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Demonstrators from the Heart of Texas group confronted pro-Muslim protesters across the street in a terrifying real-world standoff that Russia’s digital puppeteers were coordinating from five thousand miles away. Even the Russian trolls back in St. Petersburg couldn’t believe the Americans were so gullible.
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Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race)
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The most highly organized opposition to the Saudi monarchy today comes from the Muslim Brotherhood. This is an organization that some regard as a terrorist operation and others see as a pro-democracy opposition movement.
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David Rundell (Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads)
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How does it work when you have a living, breathing, and divine representative of God on Earth? Do you consult a 1300-year-old holy book when you can go right to the source? To be sure, no Nizari Ismaili will tell you that the Quran is not revered in his or her faith; they will insist that there is no contradiction between the teachings of the Aga Khan and the holy text. However, to the objective observer, it’s inevitable in this situation that the Quran becomes a secondary source, a historical reference book at most. Indeed, the Aga Khan’s modern, progressive views and rulings have resulted in the Nizari Ismaili community becoming arguably the most well-integrated, secular, apolitical, nonviolent, and generally pro-West Muslim community in the world.
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Ali A. Rizvi (The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason)
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Bhutto decided to fulfll his long- held dream of using Pakistan’s existing nuclear energy infrastructure to embark on a rapid nuclear weapon’s program. As minister for fuel, power, and national resources in Ayub Khan’s cabinet, he played an active part in the formation of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). A strong proponent of acquiring nuclear capability, Bhutto faced stern opposition from Ayub who was worried about the repercussions this could have on Pakistan’s pro- Western foreign policy.
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Ayesha Jalal (The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics)
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Nevlinsky had a more realistic, or more opportunistic, approach. He suggested that Herzl, as an eminent journalist connected with one of Europe’s most influential newspapers, could be of great service to the Ottoman Empire’s public relations regarding its persecuted Armenian minority. Accordingly, Herzl provided his newspaper a flattering interview with the Grand Vizier, Halil Rifat Pasha, and a pro-Turkish account of recent mass killings in Armenia as well as the empire’s conflict with Greece over Crete. Herzl was not unsympathetic to the Armenian cause, but he believed that Armenian “revolutionaries” were bringing misfortune upon themselves and, in a meeting in London with the Armenian nationalist leader Avetis Nazarbekian, urged him to order his followers to lay down their arms. Herzl may well have viewed the Armenians with compassion, but he also knew that so long as the “Armenian Question” exercised the sultan, he would not brook any consideration of concessions to another non-Muslim minority.
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Derek Jonathan Penslar (Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (Jewish Lives))
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If Shaytan is working twice as hard to ruin marriages, we should be working twice as hard to make a marriage.
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Shireen Patel (Muslim Marriage 101: A pro-active guide to creating a peaceful and loving marriage.)